Cisco Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module 5.1 for Nexus 1010 White Paper
Page 3
©2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
3
Network Visibility in the Data Center:
Best Practices for Staying Ahead
upon application or service performance arising from other workloads and activity occurring
within or being delivered across shared resources, whether within the data center, cloud, or
distribution and access network layers.
within or being delivered across shared resources, whether within the data center, cloud, or
distribution and access network layers.
4. Communicating and collaborating: In the old days, it was just fine if networks were monitored
and managed in a completely insulated and independent fashion, and monitoring data was kept
within the confines and control of the network operations group. But the organizational shift
towards service centric operations as well as the astounding rise in complexity of application and
infrastructure architectures is making cross-team collaboration and communications an absolute
necessity. As part of this, integrating network monitoring with a broader suite of management
practices, tools and technologies is becoming a related mandate, so that critical insights can be
brought to the fore and investigative/mitigating workflows can be truly optimized.
within the confines and control of the network operations group. But the organizational shift
towards service centric operations as well as the astounding rise in complexity of application and
infrastructure architectures is making cross-team collaboration and communications an absolute
necessity. As part of this, integrating network monitoring with a broader suite of management
practices, tools and technologies is becoming a related mandate, so that critical insights can be
brought to the fore and investigative/mitigating workflows can be truly optimized.
Collectively, network management and operations teams that embrace and successfully address these
four key best practice areas will be in position to fully support and assure a high performing, highly
reliable data center network. But even more importantly, they will be able to do so in a manner that
aligns with the most important and mission-critical applications and services that the network helps to
enable and deliver.
Cisco Network Analysis Module – Advanced Monitoring
for the Modern Data Center
As a globally recognized leader in data center infrastructure equipment and solutions, Cisco Systems is
in an excellent position to understand the scope of needs for monitoring and management of both the
network as well as the broader data center environment. In parallel with its infrastructure equipment
solutions, Cisco has developed a wide and growing range of management tools and technologies to help
practitioners deploy, provision, tune, optimize, and assure data centers successfully. One key component
within the management suite is the Cisco Network Analysis Module (NAM), which provides direct,
application-aware monitoring insights and visibility from the network perspective. Deployed either as
a blade in Cisco switches or routers, a physical appliance, or a virtual appliance, the Cisco NAM has
become a commonplace tool for network managers and operators.
The Cisco NAM solution was originally designed to function primarily as a troubleshooting tool
The Cisco NAM solution was originally designed to function primarily as a troubleshooting tool
for the networking team, but has evolved to play a larger role in supporting data center operations.
Recent additions and enhancements to the Cisco NAM portfolio reflect this evolutionary path, and
are designed specifically to help networking and cross-domain teams keep pace and stay ahead of the
challenges, despite the changes that are happening in the data center.
Staying Ahead of Scale
The new Cisco NAM Integrated Services Module for Nexus 7000 (NAM-NX1) is the highest
capacity Cisco NAM solution ever, and is able to handle sustained traffic monitoring at over 30 Gbps.
Internal storage capacity of 900 GB supports substantial packet caching, and advanced hardware
and software filtering, much of which are implemented within ASICs for high performance, further
expand effective capacity.